New Look, Same Principles

Members of the community may have noticed some cool new changes with our brand and our website. We have a new wordmark and an updated bird (mascot) as well as a new website with fresh messaging. These are thoughtful changes and reflect both what we heard from the community as well as our growing population of enterprise customers.

The premise behind the wordmark changes are superbly captured by our own Anabel Diaz in her post Continuing the journey: our new mascot and wordmark so I won’t go into detail here.

The changes to the website, while modest are worth noting for several reasons.

First, they reflect our emphasis on performance. Many vendors talk about performance, but do so in the context of the traditional object storage use cases of backup, archive and data recovery. Not exactly high performance to begin with.

Our new tagline, Object Storage for AI captures where we want to take the industry.

We are still an object store but we are focusing our attention on a class of use cases that were previously beyond the performance capabilities of traditional object storage. Those use cases include the aforementioned AI, but also other machine learning workloads, big data workloads, streaming workloads and ultimately the workloads associated with the modern, cloud native applications.

That focus will bring new features and new products to MinIO, some of which (S3 Select and Spark support) we are already seeing. Expect more performance benchmarks in the coming months. When paired with NVMe drives, MinIO is already fast enough to saturate 100GbE switches.

These numbers will change the perspective of data architects when it comes to object storage.

The second element worth noting is the addition of a partners tab. Partners are a critical component of our success and growth thus far and we will continue to invest in that capability with people, technology and training. Our approach to partners, like much of what we do, is different from the traditional model. Yes, we have leading global GSIs on our partner roster but we also have dozens of boutique shops. The mix allows us to engage more broadly, because while larger organizations may have hundreds or thousands of petabytes of storage, there are hundreds of thousands of enterprises with tens of petabytes who also need performance oriented object storage to support their applications and analytics workflows. Our partner network lets us serve all of them.

The rest of the website is functionally the same. Deeper detail on the features that make our product different, an expanded description of what our SUBNET subscription entails, but generally similar.

The same goes for our attention to technical detail. You will still find our documentation, links to GitHub and important Downloads right at your fingertips.

This brings up our last point. What is not changing.

When companies like ours mature and evolve there is a natural concern that the maturity will bring with it changes to the business model. That is not the case here.

MinIO is, and will remain, 100% open source as long as we are independent.

SUBNET is important to our business model and customers are happy to subscribe to the software and have the relationship that comes with that subscription — but they do so of their own choice.

Open Source is not about free, it is about freedom. Freedom from vendor lock-in, freedom to innovate, freedom from worrying about stability or security. We remain committed to that freedom and more importantly, our customers think that freedom has value. That is the combination that will power our growth.

These are exciting times for us as a company. We are hitting some major milestones (200M Docker pulls, 15K GitHub Stars) and are pushing the boundaries on performance, scalability and ease of use. The changes you see in how we present ourselves reflect our ambition as a company — but don’t change the business model.

As always, we want your feedback. Drop us a note at hello@min.io or hit us up on the Slack channel or Twitter. #allthedata